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Fiction Chronicle: An Army of Their Own

As bold and urgent a love story as you’ll read this year, plus a black comedy about assisted suicide.

By

Sam Sacks

Nov. 14, 2014 4:10 p.m. ET

The star-crossed lovers in Atticus Lish’s heartbreaking debut novel, “Preparation for the Next Life” (Tyrant, 417 pages, $15), have the sort of personal histories you aren’t going to find on Match.com. Zou Lei is a Uighur who left the slums of western China to live illegally in the United States. She was arrested in an immigration sweep, imprisoned for three months and then, without explanation, released into New York City with pocket change and a bag of clothing. She scrapes by in the Chinatown district of Flushing: “She was going to stay where everybody was illegal like her and get lost in the crowd and keep her head...